Besides releasing the high-end RADEON X1800-series, ATI Technologies unveiled its RADEON X1600 family of products, which are aimed at the mainstream market. The company says it has redefined the market of the most widely deployed graphics cards by offering a new level of performance and expanding the list of capabilities. But is it a correct statement? We attempt to find out with the help of over 20 benchmarks!

F.E.A.R. Multiplayer Demo

FEAR is the most demanding shooter used by our lab and it heavily uses advanced pixel shaders for special effect.

RADEON X1600 XT manages to outperform the GeForce 6800 and 6600 GT behind, but cannot achieve the same level as the RADEON X800 XL. Given that pixel shader performance of the X1600 XT should be higher than that of the X800 XL, we should again complain about the lack of sufficient amount of TMUs.

Pariah

Pariah gaming engine is based on the modified Unreal Engine using different lighting and blurring effects as well as bump-mapping. It looks like there are no complex pixel shaders in this game, so RADEON X1600 XT doesn’t have much room for showing off. Nevertheless, in 1024x768 it offers pretty high gaming performance, although in higher resolutions it yields even to GeForce 6600 GT because of the fewer TMUs. We believe that 4 texturing units are evidently not enough for 12 pixel processors and ATI should have left RV530 at least 8 of those in order to avoid frustrating bottlenecks, which wouldn’t let the newcomer reveal its real performance potential.